Lately, I've been reflecting on teleological and non-teleological understandings of processes, and noticing how we have a sort of meaning-making impulse to recon a telos onto everything.

There's something about non-teleological processes that refuses to stick in the mind. It's like water rolling off a duck's back.

We find ourselves smuggling in final causes to pin the idea down. Useless? Mu! It just *is* because it *can* be. https://twitter.com/UnlikelyWorlds/status/1336956681159372805

And the way the humanities-industrial-complex spins up enormous narrativization engines to construct a telos for processes, like COVID19, that defy teleological understandings.

There's this impulse to territorialize C19 into a political issue, to move it into the realm of the teleological. It's a hoax. It's Trump's fault. It's China's fault. It's Gates wanting to track you. It was engineered in a Chinese lab.

C19 does not care.

"Most people are not at all interested in why. Who is doing what is by far the most interesting question anybody could ask." We're a social species. https://overcast.fm/+Igy6LYlc/27:28 

At an even deeper level, I think non-teleological processes threaten our human meanings. I am thinking of, for example, the deep aversion that christian fundamentalists have toward evolution.

Non-teleological processes threaten our human meanings because they are oblivious. We feel this threat as an impulse to narrativize. If we can't weave them into the fabric of human meanings, they might punch right through, exposing the Void. https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1350552806155948032

Our trick is to construct a human-friendly niche in an indifferent universe, to make humane teleological spaces with non-teleological forces.

We often confuse ourselves. While attempting to construct humane and moral spaces using non-teleological forces, we start to see the force through the lens of our morality and mistake our morality for a causal theory.

And so you get things like CO2 PPM -> climate change upstaged by moral narratives about personal carbon footprint or plastic straws or evil oil companies and while these things may be valid, we lose sight of the core non-teleological driving force.

I mean these things are entangled in complex feedback loops because we start the process by burning oil. But when it starts to sound like “green lifestyle” or “evil oil companies are now profiting from CO2 capture” or “degrowth as atonement for sin” I’m like moral lens.

Anyway, I have this picture of fish swimming in a sea of human meanings. Sometimes it jumps out of the water, and sees this non-teleological space beyond, but it is cold and thin, and as it begins to choke, it falls back into the water.